They also run a road-test programme where manufacturers donate interesting hardware for lucky designers to try out and review.

I declared my interest in trying the mbed a few weeks ago, but so did the rest of the world; just about anyone who's involved with embedded systems would want to try out this neat product.

The mbed is an ARM-based component for rapid prototyping of microcontroller applications. It's fully featured but very compact.

It comes with extensive libraries, and its free development tool chain is online. Setting up and maintaining a development tool chain tends to be expensive or fiddly, so zero setup and zero cost are a big plus.

I'm hoping that the mbed will arrive tomorrow. When it does I'll be reporting and reviewing it here and on the Element14 website.

The image belongs to ARM, and is reproduced with their kind permission.